Breakthrough Science Roadmap Predictions: Robotics
When Prime Movers Lab launched our Breakthrough Science Roadmap in 2021, we expected it to be a living, breathing document that would evolve over the next few decades, reflecting the latest technological and scientific advances. However, we didn’t expect to see so many of our investment areas evolve so quickly, requiring multiple updates within only a few years. Nowhere is this more evident than in robotics.
Following our robotics squad work conducted by Partner Brad Pruente and Research Fellow Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte, we adopted a new appreciation for how robots and humans will work together more symbiotically than previously predicted. “The next few decades will be all about human-robot collaboration, and the winners will be the folks who figure out how to best pair humans and robots together for maximum potential,” Marissa wrote in her new thought paper.
As a result, we recently made a round of updates to the roadmap. These changes largely reflect this new conviction in human-robot collaboration as well as growing labor shortages in healthcare and advances in natural language processing made by OpenAI and others. One of the biggest changes we made that you may not notice was removing “lights out manufacturing” in the 2040s. We now believe humans will remain integral parts of the manufacturing process for decades to come as robots make us far more productive on manufacturing floors without completely eliminating the need for humans.
Check out the latest additions to the Breakthrough Science Roadmap here:
2025: Hospital robots will deliver samples, dispense medications, and disinfect rooms
Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) will become widespread and will perform tasks like transporting samples or suppliers, dispensing medication, and disinfecting rooms. Advances in perception, learning, and manipulation enable robots to navigate through hospitals more intelligently and to open doors and operate elevators.
2028: Foundational models for robotics will be developed
Foundational models in language, such as Chat-GPT, have been all anyone following AI development can talk about these days. These models can handle almost any topic, any context, and give a believable answer. That level of flexibility is greatly needed in robotics. Right now, while you can train a robot to “see” or to “move,” it is often very context specific. Much progress is now being made in “few-shot” or “zero-shot learning,” where robots are taught to recognize objects or perform actions that they have not explicitly learned before (i.e. wasn’t in the training data). These methods are rapidly improving and building blocks to finally creating foundational models for robotic vision or motion.
2028: Robots will perform surgery
Surgeons already use robots for some procedures. New control mechanisms, propulsion, imaging and sensing will give robots better ability to perform complicated procedures. Patients will have better outcomes because they and their doctors will have access to more information with less invasive methods. They will be able to get closer to areas of interest and gather data internally rather than externally.
2030: 50% of warehouses in the US will have automation by 2030–2035
We were surprised to learn that as of 2022, 80% of warehouses have no automation at all. This is in large part because past forms of automation often involve significant capital investment in redesigning a space and are inflexible to changes. Advances in technology have made robots more capable of working in existing spaces with no modifications and better at working with humans. In the next ten years, we will begin to see a surge in adoption of robots in the logistics and manufacturing space.
2032: Soft robotics will be more commonplace among commercial robots
Soft robotics uses “soft,” compliant materials rather than metals, ceramics, and hard plastics to construct robots that are physically flexible and more similar to biological systems. Hard robots can have difficulty manipulating soft or delicate objects and can be safety hazards when operating around humans. Adding in soft parts can aid with both of those problems and we expect to see more of these types of solutions take form in the coming years.
Let us know what you think we’ll get right and what we’ll get wrong.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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